labingi

A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) by David Lindsay is the best book I have read in a long time (sci fi or otherwise). It’s an odd duck: never a huge success but never out of print, influential for many, apparently including C. S. Lewis in his Space Trilogy, but often absent from the Great Works of Science Fiction lists. Until I happened on a YouTube video about it, I had never heard of it or Lindsay.

Perhaps all this isn’t surprising because the book really is odd; it may be a quintessential example a very well-written “niche” work, destined to be admired by a few and passed by by most.

Like The Space Trilogy, A Voyage to Arcturus uses a science fiction setting to stage a philosophical exploration of the meaning of life, morality, and so on. This staging is so similar, in fact, that I initially expected the book to be an allegory or thought experiment on Christian cosmology. It is not. In fact, while it echoes themes from real-world religions and philosophies, the cosmology it seems to settle on is not quite like anything else I’ve encountered. (I won’t say more here due to spoilers.)

I find this book hard to understand. I could not predict where it was going, even up to the last page. And while I found the ending a bit anti-climactic (maybe I just didn’t get it), I like all that. I like being surprised; I like being perplexed. I would take that a hundred times over being bored by sameness. I am also in awe of Lindsay’s worldbuilding. Overall this book is immensely ahead of its time. It was published in 1920, but I would have readily believed it came from the 1950s, or even a less gender-progressive corner of the ‘60’s or ‘70s. It’s that far-thinking. Spoilers below the cut( Read more... )

I was reading a comments thread (not about Good Omens) discussing how some people just don’t get satire, and I thought, “Is that me?” I understand the concept. I know “A Modest Proposal” is not a serious proposal, and I love The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is endless social sendup. I get (intellectually) that a lot of Good Omens is also satire, but it doesn’t land for me as it does for many.

Now, the love story between Aziraphale and Crowley is the best I’ve encountered in a long time. (The next most recent that might be competition is probably in the manga Acid Town (2017), so, yeah, best in at least six years.) Hence, my bemused feelings about Good Omens, especially S2: part in love and part confused.

Disclaimer: I have not read the book; I’m only referring to the TV series.

Spoilers behind the cut ( Read more... )

Recently my uncle, Bill Sanford, passed away at eighty-two years old. Bill was a minister in the Methodist Church. He was also one of the most purely positive role models in my life. I am grateful to Bill in countless ways for his loving presence, but I want to focus on the impact he had as a Christian on me as a lifelong agnostic. What a beautiful example he is of living the loving teachings of Jesus.

To explain Bill’s influence on me, it’s necessary to talk a little bit about me. I have always been an agnostic. I learned agnosticism at my parents’ knees as others learn Catholicism or Judaism. If I asked my parents if God existed, they would reply with “I don’t know.” This belief system was ingrained in me by the time I was five years old. In the years since, my sense of what agnosticism means has grown more complex, but I have never had the desire to be anything other than agnostic.

Being an Agnostic Kid in the United States

Compared to many countries, the United States, blessedly, has a high degree of religious freedom. But it is a nation culturally dominated by Christianity, and it is not always easy to be an agnostic child among a Christian majority. Here are a few of my childhood experiences:

In kindergarten, I had a Jehovah’s Witness friend. While she and her family were always nice to me, I was not allowed to play with her outside of school: my mother explained to me that they thought I was a bad influence because I wasn’t a Christian.

When I was five or six and playing with a friend at my house, I mentioned that I didn’t believe in God. My friend burst into tears and started walking for home (three miles away). As I followed her down the road, she explained, sobbing, that she couldn't play with me because I worshipped Satan. Finally I told her I did believe in God, which cheered her up. I think this is the only time I have ever flat-out lied about it.

At eleven, my lifelong best friend, a Catholic, noted offhandedly that I was damned. There was no malice in the statement: it was just a fact. I wasn’t a Christian, and only Christians are saved. (I should note that today's Catholic Church has a more nuanced view than this child's understanding.)

With such experiences, reinforced by cultural narratives like televangelists’, it is perhaps not surprising that as a child I was afraid of churches and resistant to Christian teachings. My mother dragged me to church once or twice for my cultural literacy. I remember sitting in Sunday School, being forced to sing “Jesus Loves Me” with a feeling of dark detestation at the fact that I was supposed to believe Jesus loved me because “the Bible tells me so,” as if we should believe everything we read!

But these negative impressions of Christianity were not my only childhood experience.
( My Uncle the Minister )

For the Easter service in church today, they sang the "Hallelujah Chorus"--very well. I was surprised, given that completely unrehearsed people from the congregation were invited to come sing with the choir. It sounded almost professional.

It also resonated with the Easter theme for the continuing, timeless presence of Christ. I don't mean the words. The words are not brilliant; they basically boil down to, well, "hallelujah!" But that's the thing: the song is pure adulation; it is musically perhaps the best encapsulation I ever encountered of unbridled rejoicing.

It helped me understand Easter better, a holiday that has always bemused me. The death of Christ I understand, in the sense that its power has always spoken to me. The resurrection of Christ has always made me scratch my head; if anything, it's seemed to knock the force out of the sacrifice story. But today, I felt caught up in the rejoicing.

The song itself spoke to me of the persistence of joy in the world. It was written c. 1750 and has well passed its 250th birthday. Handel is long dead, but his expression of rejoicing remains. If he had done nothing else in his career, he would be well vindicated by this song. Generation after generation rejoices to it: it keeps uplifting hearts, as the idea of the resurrected Jesus does. It reminds us that in a world that seems bound to the endless repetitions of sorrow, there is an equally endless return to joy.

The moment in my life when I felt most inspired to sing this song (well, in my head) was when I heard that Obama had won the presidential election--not that I wanted him to be king of kings forever but because I felt a need to express rejoicing. For the first time in over 30 years of life, I felt like integrity had won over corruption.

I was proved wrong within about 6 months, and while I still personally like Obama, his near incapability to enact any meaningful reform has shaken my faith in the capacity of the American government to be reformed far more than Bush's presidency ever did. In the Bush years, we could blame Bush. But Obama is smart and fundamentally moral, and there's nothing to blame but the system. The smart and moral apparently can't win.

And yet, my memory of that evening miraculously remains unsullied. I don't feel betrayed that my brain sang several choruses of "Hallelujah," because the feeling itself was as precious as it was unprecedented, and the feeling had value, even if it presaged little practical good.

(P.S. Sorry, Ivan icon. I mock you, but I love you.)

I have just finished reading, with great enjoyment, Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. I had never read one of his books before and was charmed by his personable yet scholarly voice. I agreed with a lot of his arguments and, he would be pleased to hear, even felt myself swing a little further to the atheist side of the pendulum. But I did not agree with everything, so here I mount my defense of religion/"God" against Dawkins' assertions of its (at best) uselessness.

( Oddly enough, spoilers for the end of Mirage of Blaze )